


Opportunity Knocks

by Tierfal



Series: Figments [1]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Fluff, M/M, Romance, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-10-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:14:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26798674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Havoc and Rebecca just got married. Ed has a hunch, an itching curiosity, and a couple of drinks in him.
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Series: Figments [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1954360
Comments: 41
Kudos: 749





	Opportunity Knocks

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, friends ♥
> 
> I'm slightly stuck on stuff, and when I've been working on long fics for a while, I always have this caving-in need to finish something, so… here's a ficlet to start a collection so that I can just add crap to it whenever I feel like it! XD
> 
> Posting this on October 3 was an accident, but here we are. ENJOY ♥
> 
> For the record, what the "Brigadier General" drop at the beginning is meant to imply is that this is at least four or five years post-Promised Day. I might get more specific later if I feel like it. Don't @ me. c: 
> 
> ………also, content warning for banter about poisoning people??? I hope that's not an issue for anyone, but just in case!

Somebody less familiar with how rowdy Eastern weddings got might have been a bit surprised that so many of the guests were still going strong as the clock hands crept towards eleven. It _had_ come as a surprise, to Ed at least, that the city folks in Rebecca’s family were keeping up so well.

The point was that there was enough ambient noise that he didn’t notice the sound until he’d sat down—at a dinner table empty but for one occupant.

Roy had removed his dress gloves and laid them neatly next to the table card, which bore his name and that hard-won, stupid-ass _Brigadier General_ to boot. He was running his bare fingertip around the rim of a champagne glass.

That alone wouldn’t have registered on the weird scale. Ed had been told, frequently, sometimes in so many words, that his weird scale had been wildly miscalibrated during the bizarre series of primarily traumatic events that comprised his childhood, but—still. He’d seen a lot of people get drunk in the years since then. Hoarding a couple of mostly-empty champagne flutes and caressing the rims of them was pretty tame, all things considered.

So the activity itself wasn’t too remarkable, at least to Ed.

But the _finesse_ caught him off-guard.

Yes, he knew damn well that Roy could devote himself to a discipline; he knew damn well that Roy was particularly skilled with his hands; he knew damn well that Roy had always made a big show of appreciating the ‘finer’ things in life. He’d just never anticipated that that combination of factors might add up to Roy summoning the most startlingly consistent, hauntingly even chiming sounds imaginable out of a couple of abandoned glasses.

Roy had glanced over at him as he’d approached—subtly, of course. Old habits took long enough to die when you weren’t using them, and he probably still used that one a lot.

New habits were a different beast, though, with claws and teeth and venom and fur that looked very, _very_ soft from a safe distance.

When Ed sat down, Roy arched one eyebrow and almost smiled.

Ed smiled back, but he kept it cautious for now. Al might’ve been wrong. It had happened once or twice before, and the rarity of it didn’t dull the sting.

“Bad news,” Ed said. He jerked his chin towards the glasses. “I think you finally found your calling.”

“I know,” Roy said. His hands had stilled while Ed had spoken, but now he dragged his fingertip around the circumference of one of the flutes that summoned a slightly higher note. It resonated so clearly this close that it felt like it burrowed into Ed’s fucking bones. “It’s a terrible shame. The worst part is that when I contacted all of the orchestras in Central, they all informed me that they’ve already filled the position. I suspect that I’ll have to keep my day job.”

It was different now. Everything was different. No orders; no uniforms—Ed had misplaced his suit jacket somewhere near the table he’d been seated at; Roy had laid his neatly over the back of his chair. The only thing between them now was a third of a table with a lavender silk tablecloth, littered with the evidence of a half-dozen partygoers’ passage. Someone from the waitstaff had cleared away all the plates, but Ed didn’t envy whoever would be tasked with gathering up the crumpled white napkins and the fallen flower petals and the glittering bits of silver confetti.

It was different. Level playing field; still water; a sense of… respect. That was what it was, wasn’t it? They’d been apart for long enough to forget the things they’d used to fight over for the purpose of having something to be angry about—for the purpose of feeling something other than despair.

“Huh,” Ed said. “Tragic.”

“Quite,” Roy said. He looked over again. Ed was tipsy, sure, but Ed had spent a _lot_ of time watching this bastard, and he had a better idea of what to look for in people these days. This particular glance was slightly guarded. If nothing else, Al had been on to something: Ed wasn’t the only one who felt the new-habit creature breathing down the back of his neck. “Do you want to give it a try?” Roy asked, gesturing smoothly to his collection of repossessed glassware. “It’s a lot easier than it looks.”

“Nah,” Ed said. It was an instinctual response, but most people wouldn’t settle for those. He didn’t want to get into it about the arm—about how it didn’t always respond to him, or not in the way that he expected it to; about the different kinds of unprompted pain; about his increasingly well-supported suspicion that some of the nerves hadn’t reset right. Nobody needed that sob story, least of all somebody like Roy. “It’s more fun watching you do it.”

That garnered another smile, which meant another piece of evidence. This one was a touch broader, and a touch sharper. “More fun than dancing, evidently. You looked like you were enjoying yourself for a while.”

“Jeez,” Ed said. Heat rose in his cheeks; god _damn_. You really never did grow out of this shit. Talk about universal injustices. “Al and Winry’ll go all night if we let ’em; they’re a couple of animals. I’m too old for that shit.”

Roy arched both eyebrows this time, and the smile widened substantially.

Ed pointed a finger to halt him in the nick of time. “Hey. Shut up.”

Roy blinked innocently at him. “I hadn’t even opened—”

“Now you have,” Ed said. “So shut up.” He sat back in the chair, which wasn’t particularly comfortable, but folding your arms without slouching never quite conveyed the same attitude. “Besides, it’s… we’re gonna have a storm later this week. The automail barometer’s almost never wrong on that one. If I’d kept at it much longer, I wouldn’t’ve been able to walk tomorrow.” The flash of empathy that crossed Roy’s face was just as bad as the ache of it, honestly. “So what’s your excuse?”

Roy paused and cast a fake-idle look around them. Ed had learned that you had to watch people—especially people like Roy—in the very first instant if you wanted to scrounge up any clues about what was going on inside their well-protected heads.

“I don’t like weddings,” Roy said after a moment that Ed measured out around half a dozen heartbeats. “They’re… the sentiment I admire, but in practice they tend to amount to a rather… loud… reminder to many of us that we’re going to die alone.”

The “ _You_?” burst out of Ed before he had the slightest hope of containing it, which understandably made Roy glance over at him sharply.

“Unfortunately,” Roy said, in the delicate voice of restrained contempt that Ed remembered way too damn well, “I haven’t yet mastered the ability to be anybody else, so as it—”

“Shut up,” Ed said again. That was much more familiar than the vulnerability. Roy was sort of right, about weddings—about the way they forced you to think about things that you probably didn’t want to think about, and shoved you into a weird liminal space where you had to reidentify tons of people that you knew, completely out of context. The whole expereince felt weirdly reckless. “I meant—are you kidding? I mean, I know you’ve been drinking—hell, I’ve been drinking; _Armtstrong’s_ been drinking, I hope you got to see some of that—but do you know who you _are_? The only way you’re gonna die alone, Mustang, is if you’re secretly poisoning whoever you’re dating right before you’re due to go.”

That had come out… marginally darker than intended, but he’d recovered from worse. Sort-of-recovered, anyway. Patched-up-ish.

“Shit,” he said. “Probably even if it’s not a secret. Probably a lot of people would stick with you even if they _knew_ that you were dosing ’em with arsenic a couple times a week.”

Roy was watching him very, very closely—which couldn’t be especially pleasant, since Ed had it on pretty good authority that he looked like an idiot when he started backpedaling like this.

“Hmm,” Roy said. That wasn’t promising, exactly, but there was a glimmer in his eye that Ed… liked. If it was what he thought it was. He had to be sure. With Mustang, you _always_ had to be sure. “Is that your way of saying that _you_ would date me even if arsenic was rather literally on the table?”

“Hell, no,” Ed said. “I have standards.”

Roy’s eyes went wide, and his mouth twisted just slightly, and his shoulders shifted back—just for a fraction of a second before his face went unerringly neutral again.

Jackpot.

“If you were gonna kill me while we were dating,” Ed said, flicking his bangs away from his face with his left hand, “it’d have to be in a duel with swords. Fancy swords. I wouldn’t settle for anything less.”

This time, there was a fraction of a second where Roy looked equal parts relieved and hopeful and disbelieving before he smoothed it all out into vague amusement again.

Double jackpot.

“I see,” Roy said, evenly. “Am I to take it, then, that you’d go out with me for the small price of a fancy sword?”

“Swords are kind of a big commitment,” Ed said. He’d clenched his hands together in his lap so that he wouldn’t fiddle with the tablecloth. He’d already won the damn poker game, more or less for the first time in history—why was he shaking harder now? “Y’know, in the grand scheme of a relationship or whatever. Maybe we should start with a steak dinner next Saturday and see how it goes.”

“At a place that does nice cocktails,” Roy said. “So that they can put a very small fancy sword in your drink.” He smiled; he arched an eyebrow; Ed wanted to dive across the table and kiss that look right off his face, and then… keep kissing. For a while. “Just in case.”

“Good idea,” Ed said, and he was ninety percent sure that he was even talking about the cocktail glass sword. “If you start to be a pain in the ass, I can stab you a little and then leave. Like a tiny practice round for the duel later.”

“Perfect,” Roy said, articulating every single sound of it so distinctly that Ed was only about eighty percent sure that _he_ was talking about the cocktail glass sword.

Ed sat back and tried to relax his hands by force. The right one resisted. He was almost but not really getting used to it. “Something like that, anyway.”

They looked at each other for a couple of seconds.

Everything was different, after all.

Ed was warming up to _different_ awfully fast.

“Edward,” Roy said, and the way that the _R_ curled coming off his tongue made Ed’s spine contract; “I don’t suppose… Do you have one more dance in you tonight?”

Ed was—rationally, he felt—somewhat concerned about the burning sensation localized near the center of his chest. He blinked.

“I did mean that as a question,” Roy said, ever-so-slightly hastily. “I know you mentioned that the automail is giving you trouble, so if the answer is ‘no’, of course that’s a perfectly acceptable—”

Ed shoved his chair back, stood, and reached out with his left hand—right across the cluttered table; right past the peonies. “Shut up. No take-backs.”

Roy blinked, so at least that was equivalent. Then he unfolded out of his chair with that same fucking languid grace as always, and he reached his hand right back.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “Take-backs are antithetical to my strict moral code.”

“They’d better be,” Ed said. Grasping Roy’s hand was—bizarre. Indescribably bizarre. And indescribably _good_. 

Ed had been working on it for a while now, but good things still scared the hell out of him. You couldn’t hold onto them—not like this; not by tightening your fingers; not without strangling the goodness right out of them. Even if you tried it, they always slipped away. Bad shit was a downpour; good shit was cupping warm water in your cold hands.

He recognized that the fear was probably what pushed him towards the impulse to be an asshole, but surely he was entitled to an assholish comment or two after all these years.

“You sure _you’re_ up to it?” he said as they stepped around the edge of the table, _holding fucking hands_. Roy’s felt every bit as strong and sure and skilled and gorgeous as Ed had ever furtively, furiously imagined that it would. “You don’t have to run along home and put your dentures in yet?”

Roy smiled sunnily and gently squeezed Ed’s fingers.

“I mean this in the very best way possible,” he said, “but you, my dear, are going to _pay_ for that.”

Ed laughed all the way back to the fucking dance floor, where Al was looking back at him, expression record-breakingly smug.

Sometimes it wasn’t so bad when Al was right.


End file.
